sided, with walls on two sides and the ultrawide stairs rising up out of the water on the third. On the fourth side, there were some stone buildings, half-submerged.
Darkness filled the air above this miniharbor. But a sickly yellow light peeked over the horizon at the top of the steps, illuminating the space.
It was a gargantuan cavern, the ceiling easily six hundred feet high.
The hatch on the conning tower swung open and the Sea Ranger and Jack emerged, gazing in wonder at the immense dark space around their little sub.
Wickham drew a flare gun, but Jack stopped him.
“No! Wolf’s already here.”
He nodded up at the sickly yellow glow above them—the result of flares already fired elsewhere in the supercavern.
Within a few minutes, they’d rowed ashore and, with the Sea Ranger and the twins beside him and Horus perched on his shoulder, Jack stepped up the wide hill of stairs, climbing them.
When they reached the top and beheld what lay beyond them, Jack let out a gasp of astonishment.
“God save us all,” he whispered.
THE SECOND VERTEX
AN UNDERGROUND city lay before him.
An entire city.
A collection of stone buildings, all of them tall and thin like towers, stretched away from him for at least five hundred yards. Bridges connected all of them—some dizzyingly high, others very low, others still were constructed of steeply angled stone stairways.
Canals of water filled the “streets” between all these buildings, seawater that over the millennia had seeped in through the cave’s two entrances and flooded the city’s floor.
Dominating the forest of towers before him was a massive ziggurat, a great stepped pyramid that rose up in the very center of the ghost city.
Exactly as it did in ancient Ur,Jack thought.
At the summit of this ziggurat was a very peculiar structure: an ultrahigh and very thin ladder-type object that shot up vertically from the ziggurat’s peak until it hit the rocky ceiling of the cavern two hundred feet above.
At the point where the ladder hit the cavern’s ceiling, a series of rung-like handholds led to the spectacular centerpiece of the cavern, a centerpiece that took Jack’s breath away.
Looming off to the side of the underground city was another inverted pyramid—bronze and immense, exactly like the one Jack had seen at Abu Simbel.
It hung from the ceiling of this cavern, hovering like some kind of spaceship above the vast indoor city, easily twice the size of the ziggurat below.
From where he stood, Jack couldn’t see any buildings directly beneath the pyramid—he guessed that it hung suspended above a bottomless abyss like the one at Abu Simbel had done.
But unlike the one at Abu Simbel, this pyramid was surrounded by its supplicant city, an exact twin of the ancient Mesopotamian city of Ur.
Jack wondered if all six of the vertices were somehow subtly different, unique shrines built to complement a central upside-down pyramid—Abu Simbel had a massive viewing hall looking out at its pyramid; this one had a city of spectacular bridges kneeling before it.
Suddenly, shouts and mechanical noises made Jack look up. They’d come from the other side of the cavern.
A flight of steep stone steps rose up the side of the nearest tower. Jack climbed them. Arriving at the summit of the tower, he was rewarded with a full view of the immense cavern and a glimpse of exactly where he stood in this life-or-death race.
Things didn’t look good.
There, standing on a rooftop halfway across the vast cavern, having obviously got here some time ago, surrounded by the men of his quasi-private army, was Wolf.
Jack swore.
His enemies were far more advanced across the labyrinth than he was. Once again he was starting from behind.
And then, among the group of soldiers standing immediately behind Wolf, Jack glimpsed a diminutive figure, and his heart sank.
He only saw the figure for a moment, but the image lodged in his brain instantly: head bowed, left arm in a sling, right hand gripping Jack’s fireman’s helmet, terrified and alone, it was a small black boy with glasses.
It was Alby.
COMPARATIVE POSITIONS OF JACK’S AND WOLF’S TEAMS
THE CITY AND THE PYRAMID
THE SECOND VERTEX
BENEATH THE CAPE OF GOOD HOPE
SOUTH AFRICA
DECEMBER 17, 2007, 0255 HOURS
